Boston Dynamics' robots are at their best on shaky ground. The wobbly BigDog, its larger LS3 sibling, and the humanoid Atlas all shamble forward and recover from falls. The company, for sale by its owner Google, is now looking for a buyer, and now it appears they may have finally found a firm place to land: Toyota. The Tokyo-based company has nursing care and medical robots in development, in addition to working on self-driving cars. Toyota could add up to 300 personnel to its robotics division with the acquisitions, the report said.

We present a novel k-way high-dimensional graphical model called the Generalized Root Model (GRM) that explicitly models dependencies between variable sets of size k > 2---where k = 2 is the standard pairwise graphical model. This model is based on taking the k-th root of the original sufficient statistics of any univariate exponential family with positive sufficient statistics, including the Poisson and exponential distributions. As in the recent work with square root graphical (SQR) models [Inouye et al. 2016]---which was restricted to pairwise dependencies---we give the conditions of the parameters that are needed for normalization using the radial conditionals similar to the pairwise case [Inouye et al. 2016]. In particular, we show that the Poisson GRM has no restrictions on the parameters and the exponential GRM only has a restriction akin to negative definiteness. We develop a simple but general learning algorithm based on L1-regularized node-wise regressions. We also present a general way of numerically approximating the log partition function and associated derivatives of the GRM univariate node conditionals---in contrast to [Inouye et al. 2016], which only provided algorithm for estimating the exponential SQR. To illustrate GRM, we model word counts with a Poisson GRM and show the associated k-sized variable sets. We finish by discussing methods for reducing the parameter space in various situations.

A French ship searching the Mediterranean has detected black box signals from a missing EgyptAir flight in the waters between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast, a development that could help solve the mystery of why the aircraft crashed into the sea last month, killing all 66 on board. The discovery, announced Wednesday, could help guide search teams to the wreckage and the flight's data and cockpit voice recorders, which if retrieved unharmed could reveal whether a mechanical fault or a hijacking or bomb caused the disaster. In the two weeks since Flight 804 disappeared from radar en route to Cairo from Paris, only small pieces of debris and human remains have been retrieved from the crash site. No terrorist group has claimed responsibility, though Egypt's civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, has said terrorism is a more likely cause than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. The flight recorders will be critical to determining whether the disaster was caused by an accident or a deliberate act.

Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part series on AI. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. We have what may be an extremely difficult problem with an unknown time to solve it, on which quite possibly the entire future of humanity depends. Welcome to Part 2 of the "Wait how is this possibly what I'm reading I don't get why everyone isn't talking about this" series. Part 1 started innocently enough, as we discussed Artificial Narrow Intelligence, or ANI (AI that specializes in one narrow task like coming up with driving routes or playing chess), and how it's all around us in the world today. We then examined why it was such a huge challenge to get from ANI to Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI (AI that's at least as intellectually capable as a human, across the board), and we discussed why the exponential rate of technological advancement we've seen in the past suggests that AGI might not be as far away as it seems. This left us staring at the screen, ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes difficult tasks possible, such as sorting and recognising patterns in incredibly large data sets. The most challenging problems often have unexpected input and are often referred to as AI-compete or AI-difficult, implying the need for human-like computation. While some might think of AI as technology mostly used for complex visual tasks – or even as a far-fetched concept only found in science fiction – it's used in more ways than most people realise. That raises the question: could modern society get by without this fast-growing technology? Depending on the source, some claim AI has been around since ancient times, when the Greeks had myths about robots, and engineers from Egypt and China built automatons.

Dubai Police is reportedly planning to use robots and artificial intelligence in its policing of the city by 2020. Local publication Emirates 24/7 cited Dubai Police Smart Department general director Colonel Khalid Razooqi as saying robots could do the work of a police officer on the ground in some situations. "We are working on a similar project and it will be ready by Expo 2020," he was quoted as saying. This follows testing of a robot during the Gitex Technology Week event to gain user feedback. "The project we are working on will involve robots interacting with people and performing some responsibilities that of a police officer," Razooqi said, according to the publication.

If the battle between rival digital assistants can be summed up by the NBA championships, then Google's take would be the Golden State Warriors? That's assuming, of course, the record-setting Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to defend their NBA title. It's the analogy used by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who characterized the competition as more friendly than bloody. "This is not like'Game of Thrones,'" he said Wednesday at Recode's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. Artificial intelligence is already a hot topic at the conference, and it's a big part of Google's future.

In the future, you probably won't use your keyboard to get to this website. So predicts of one of the internet's top oracles, Mary Meeker, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. On Wednesday Meeker, a long time investor and financial analyst, unveiled her annual predictions of the technology industry's future at a conference in southern California. The two big takeaways: people will do more talking to their computers and less typing on them. Oh – and the technology sector's days of easy, red-hot growth may be behind it because an increasing percentage of the Earth's population already owns a smartphone.

"If we can do it in the right and thoughtful way we are always open to it," said Pichai at the Code conference here. "I care about serving consumers everywhere." Google pulled out of mainland China and moved its Chinese-language search engine to Hong Kong in 2010 after a series of cyber attacks on Google originated in the country. Google also said it would stop censoring search results in China. The controversial move cut Google off from the fast-growing Chinese market, one that's been courted by rival Facebook and constitutes the second-biggest market for Apple.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Killer robots pose a threat to all of us. In the movies, this threat is usually personified as an evil machine bent on destroying humanity for reasons of its own. In reality, the threat comes from within us.